Animal Rights Conversation

I got a thoughtful comment on the New Madisonian about the animal rights post from a few days ago and, after writing a long response in the comments section that was erased and totally lost, I decided I'll try to put my response in a post instead to make sure I don't lose it again. Here's the original comment:
 
 
I think a number of points are oversimplified in this analysis. First, consider the relationship between the human and the fly. The reality is that all organisms exist as part of an enormously complex and fragile "circle of life," as Mufasa put it. If humans killed too many flies, a vital link in the food chain would be threatened, and thus all its constituents would be affected. It is true that killing one fly would have no material effect on any human, and probably on only a small community of flies (just as it is true that killing one human would affect no fly and, in most cases, only a small community of humans). The problem surfaces only when the application of a rule (i.e. it is okay to kill flies) is carried to its extreme. However, in the grand scheme of things, we depend on the fly for the many ecological functions it serves, perhaps even more than it depends on us. Therefore, by your analysis, both species do in fact have at least one right with respect to each other: the right to exist. Any further distinctions drawn among which particular members get to exist would seem arbitrary. Now, does this mean we should literally never kill a fly? The short answer is “no,” but let me explain:

The dictum "we hold these truths to be self-evident" suggests that the existence of human rights needs no further justification because it is itself fundamental, true or obvious. However, without some rationale, it makes no more sense to accord humans rights than to accord them to flies, dogs, hot dogs, or plankton. One sensible criterion, as PETA suggests, is to proportion the ethical or moral consideration a species gets to its capacity for moral agency, higher thinking, and ability to feel pain and emotions. This explains well why most of us feel no remorse stepping on an ant, a little more driving over a squirrel, still more putting a dog to sleep, and the greatest amount killing a fellow human. (As an aside, this framework does indeed raise serious questions about what rights beings of artificial intelligence should be entitled to, particularly ones with abilities to feel and think at a higher level than humans.)

But to return to my unanswered question, “Should we literally never kill a fly,” it now makes sense to conclude, “Well, technically you should not, but if you do you only need to feel a little bit bad about it.” And then, of course, if you were to kill many, many flies, to the point that you threatened a significant portion of the fly population, you should feel worse, both because the total intrinsic value of the lives you would have taken would have accumulated tremendously, and because in so doing you would be threatening the human population as well.

Finally, it seems that by your conception of rights flies do in fact have rights, but only with respect to other flies (and other organisms which they can interact with in an immediate, tangible way), and so rights may not be fundamentally human in nature.
 

 
I'll try to write again (in a more concise fashion) what I wrote in the forever-lost comment response. I'll examine the objections to my previous post starting at the end.
 
Flies don't have rights in relation to each other any more than they have rights in relation to us. Whether flies have value to each other or to us, they can't have rational interactions within or outside their species. There's a fundamental distinction at work here that I tried to make in my original post (apparently without complete success): what matters in identifying rights is determining what guarantees are necessary for mutually constructive rational interaction, not just mutually constructive interaction. The reason humans need rights is that they can't rationally expect mutually beneficial relationships if they have to worry that someone will bludgeon them with a tube sock filled with quarters and take what they have. Flies don't have the mental faculty to trade with anything in a conscious way, so it would be meaningless to pretend there are guarantees they need for mutually beneficial interaction. The fact that killing all flies would harm humans means that it would be perfectly appropriate and wise for us to pass laws prohibiting humans from killing some vast number of flies. It doesn't mean that they have rights. Potable water is also valuable to us and must be conserved, that doesn't mean that water has rights.
 
To address the utilitarian argument for animal rights, I think it's telling that the justification you offer for why utilitarianism makes sense as a standard for judgment is that it conforms to the level of remorse people usually feel when they kill different kinds of animals. I'm not suggesting that that's the only rationale you're offering for utilitarianism, but I think the remorse standard and utilitarianism are doomed by the same type of flaw: both standards are arbitrary. No one really argues in favor for the remorse standard because it's too obviously dependent on how relatively sensitive or sadistic a particular person is. Utilitarianism is just as arbitrary, but it shifts the subjective vantage point from the perpetrator to the victim.
 
To explore that point, let's consider an example. Remember the movie Independence Day? If you don't, a nomadic civilization of aliens comes to Earth to wipe us out and take our resources (only they didn't count on Will Smith's awesomeness or Jeff Goldblum's magical laptop.) The movie doesn't really say it, but let's assume the alien civilization needs Earth's resources to survive. Utilitarianism suggests that the righteousness of our resistance depends on how sensitive the aliens are to pain. If they are more emotionally deep than humans (or if their total numbers are such that their pain outweighs ours), then our struggle for survival would be immoral. As we assume a lower and lower ability for pain for the aliens, our right to existence suddenly exerts itself and our actions become moral. The dilemma I think this poses for utilitarianism is that there isn't a non-arbitrary reason to make such judgments. Why should a rational being sacrifice its existence on the basis of how much pain its adversary can feel? The only answer to that question is that the dogma of utilitarianism says so. In the same sense, if the fly were capable of making moral judgments in the first place, it would be justified in trying to avoid Obama's murderous slap regardless of the level of pain Obama was experiencing through annoyance.
 
I think that addresses the points on animal rights, but it's also worth noting the distinction about rules. Any rule has to be built on a foundation of assumptions regarding the physical world. It's a trivial exercise to concoct some situation in which a rule contradicts the original standard of right and wrong that produced it. My favorite example of this is "it's never OK to throw an old woman to the concrete" which can instantly be rendered ridiculous by adding "even out of the path of an oncoming bus." However, there's a difference between showing an untenable consequence of a rule originally based on a particular standard and showing how that standard leads to unbearable results.